John Rosenow, a Wisconsin dairy farmer, says that if Donald Trump deports all undocumented aliens, Americans will have to get used to a whole new diet.
“If there’s no immigrant labour, there’s no milk, no cheese, no butter, no ice cream,” the dairy farmer said. “We’ll all have to go vegan.”
Rosenow’s farm in Waumandee, western Wisconsin, is almost entirely reliant on foreign workers. The US president’s pledge to initiate the biggest deportation plan in American history could, he said, destroy that workforce — and threaten the future of his farm.
“I had a lot fewer worries before Trump got elected,” said the 75-year-old, who has openly campaigned against the policy. “We’re in a whole new world now.”
Trump has made immigration reform a cornerstone of his second presidential term. Immediately after being sworn in he deployed troops to secure the southern border, citing a national emergency.
In a flurry of executive orders he also paused the resettlement of refugees, expanded the pool of undocumented immigrants subject to fast-track deportation and ordered the enlargement of facilities to detain illegal aliens. He has also spoken of sending federal officers to round up and remove thousands of people deemed to be in the US without permission.
The moves have gone down well with Trump’s base. But business groups are expressing concern about the impact they will have on the agricultural sector, which they said could not function without immigrant labour.
The dairy industry is particularly vulnerable. Produce growers can recruit legal seasonal workers to harvest fruit and vegetables, under the H-2A visa programme for temporary farmhands. But there is no such system for dairy farms, which require workers to milk cows three times a day, all year round.
It is no wonder, then, that rural Wisconsin, a thinly-populated state with 3.5mn cows that is nicknamed “America’s Dairyland”, is bracing itself for the coming immigration crackdown.
“We support the deportation of criminals, but we need a secure labour force for Wisconsin,” said Tyler Wenzlaff, head of government relations at the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation in the capital, Madison.
Many undocumented labourers had, he said, “worked on the same farm for years”, sent their children to local schools and become “part of the fabric of rural Wisconsin”.
Hans Breitenmoser says the ‘dairy industry will die a horrible death’ if undocumented workers are deported © Guy Chazan/FT
Wisconsin has been nicknamed ‘America’s Dairyland’ © Jim Vondruska/FT
One farmer who fears the consequences of the new regime is Hans Breitenmoser of Lincoln County, northern Wisconsin. “Am I worried that some or all of my workforce could be swept up? Yeah, for sure,” he said. “I’m more worried now than ever before.”
Breitenmoser, who employs 11 Mexican workers, said the Trump administration had not thought through how repatriations could affect the economy of states such as Wisconsin.
“Let’s say the people in Washington could wave a magic wand and make all these people disappear — you’d have dead cows piling up outside the dairy farms,” he said. “The industry would die a horrible death within 48 hours. Because no one would be there to slaughter the cows, let alone milk them.”
Trump has long claimed that illegal immigration hurt all Americans. In his first term he said it undermined public safety while also placing “enormous strain” on local schools, hospitals and communities, “taking precious resources away from the poorest Americans who need them most”.
Allies, such as vice-president JD Vance, have argued that choking off the supply of easily-exploitable foreigners will force employers to hire US-born workers.
But Rosenow questions whether there are any native-born Americans who would be prepared to work on his farm.
He said he was at his “wits’ end” before he started employing foreign workers in 1998. The turning point was an incident in the 1990s when a US-born worker turned up for a job he had advertised. “All these cans of beer fell out when he opened the car door,” he said. “I rang one of his references and he said he’d never hire him back.”
Rosenow’s reliance on workers from south of the border is typical for American agriculture.
According to Daniel Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State University, some 40 per cent of the 2.4mn farmworkers in the US are unauthorised to work. “They play a critical role that many US-born workers are either unable or unwilling to perform,” he said.
That is borne out by statistics. According to a survey carried out by the National Council of Agricultural Employers in 2020, just 337 US-born workers applied for the 97,691 season agricultural jobs advertised between March and May that year.
As a result, any move to deport undocumented labourers en masse would have a “significant impact on the US food system” and “increase the cost of producing food”, Ortega said. “Instead of bringing prices down these policies will drive them up.”
Rosenow said he was prepared for the moment federal officers came to his farm. He produced a card of a local businessman who had expressed an interest in buying his herd for resale in Texas and South Dakota. “He’s the first person I’ll call,” he said.
He showed a second card, too — one that he has issued to all of his workers, instructing them, in English and Spanish, not to open the door to immigration officers and to exercise their constitutional right not to answer their questions.
Roberto Tecpile says he will go home if he is deported © Jim Vondruska/FT
Kevin Tecpile says Americans do not appear to appreciate immigrant workers © Jim Vondruska/FT
His employees are stoical. “If I’m deported I’ll just go home, to where my family is,” said Roberto Tecpile, a native of the Mexican town of Zongolica, in Veracruz state, who has worked on Rosenow’s farm for the past 10 years.
“The people who are going to suffer the most are the business owners, who’ll lose a lot of money.”
His son Kevin, who works alongside him, is more combative. “We should all just say, fine, and leave this country, and they’ll see what happens,” he said.
The number of daily arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has ticked up since Trump took office, reaching a high of 1,179 on January 27, though it has trended down since then. White House social media accounts have carried photos of migrants being led on to military aircraft in shackles. They have also posted the names of foreigners charged with murder, theft and child abuse who had been “arrested and pending removal”.
Yet experts said the administration lacked the money and manpower to increase deportations dramatically, particularly from isolated areas such as rural Wisconsin.
There are also wider economic constraints. “If there is a significant enforcement event on a big farm or meatpacking plant that happens to be in a red state, you will have business owners in that state saying — this is not what we had in mind,” said Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.
A worker fills water containers of adolescent cows at their individual enclosures at Rosenholm Dairy farm in Cochrane, Wisconsin © Jim Vondruska/FT
A worker on a bulldozer inside a cow enclosure at Rosenholm Dairy farm © Jim Vondruska/FT
But even if implementation lags, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was “having a huge chilling effect”, Chishti said. “It’s instilling a sense of fear and insecurity and extracting a lot of pain from people up and down the country.”
John Hollay, head of government relations at the International Fresh Produce Association, a trade group, said the fear was particularly prevalent among workers in the fruit and vegetable industry.
“We have heard intermittent reports of people not turning up for work, certainly in California,” he said. “We’ve seen enforcement actions at convenience stores — in California, Texas and Florida — and word gets around the community.”
In Wisconsin, which voted for Trump in 2024, some farmers support his immigration agenda, despite their reliance on precisely the kind of workers the White House is targeting.
“Do I believe that we need to control our border? Absolutely,” said one Republican-voting Wisconsin dairy farmer, who declined to give his name. “Do I believe we need immigration reform? Absolutely.”
“Trump is good at bringing a problem to the fore that needs to be resolved, and if he’s as good as he says he is, it will be resolved.”
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But Breitenmoser, who is active in Democrat politics, said the debate had taken a negative tone that was “demonising and scapegoating a whole group of people”.
As he spoke, a 50mph wind suddenly blew across the farm, whipping up snow and carrying off an empty calf hutch, depositing it on a horse fence. It is a world away from his workers’ hot and humid homeland in Mexico, more than a 1,000 miles to the south.
“These people show up every day, responsibly and reliably do the hard work that others don’t want to do, and yet they’re constantly accused of being rapists, murderers and drug-dealers,” he said.
Over on the Rosenow farm, Kevin Tecpile admits to being disappointed by what Trump’s victory says about America. “It’s been a surprise to see how much racism there is in US society,” he said. “They just don’t seem to appreciate us.”
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